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Shumway: Mozilla Does An Open-Source SWF Runtime

11-14-2012, 05:20 PM

Phoronix: Shumway: Mozilla Does An Open-Source SWF Runtime

Mozilla announced Shumway this week, a new research project that seeks to create an open SWF (Adobe Flash) run-time environment to make Flash more open and for exposing SWF capabilities to platforms where the Adobe file-format wasn't backed by an official Flash Player...

I mean yes flash is a technology still used mainly in pornography websites and websites designed by idiots but it goes away. Mozilla (and google/youtube + porn sites) should start pushing open web formats aggressively (ie not use webm as a fallback and disable it for monetized videos on youtube). Also we should get rid of h264 and shit like that from the web.

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I mean yes flash is a technology still used mainly in pornography websites and websites designed by idiots but it goes away. Mozilla (and google/youtube + porn sites) should start pushing open web formats aggressively (ie not use webm as a fallback and disable it for monetized videos on youtube). Also we should get rid of h264 and shit like that from the web.

Good question, why. If it was like 2005-2010 It'd make sense. Now it's too late, in 3-5 years when/if Shumway is good and up to date HTML5 (webgl, native video, canvas, svg, geolocation, local database api etc) will probably be solid and spread enough for production use.

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Good question, why. If it was like 2005-2010 It'd make sense. Now it's too late, in 3-5 years when/if Shumway is good and up to date HTML5 (webgl, native video, canvas, svg, geolocation, local database api etc) will probably be solid and spread enough for production use.

Because back then everyone was holding on to the dream that Adobe would pull its head out and implement Flash for something other than x86+Windows. It was only recently that Adobe finally had the decency to make it clear that they aren't going to do that. It was so hard for their developers to do anything cross platform that they're now running, tail tucked, mumbling something about HTML5 (a developing standard--not an established tech like Flash) whooping their ass.

It's mostly about all the content that is still out there alive and strong that can't be viewed on an ARM devices due to Adobe's ball dropping. It's not that the ball was worth carrying around but the truth is that we're stuck with it and will be for some time. Having mobile browsers that don't support Flash won't make it go away any faster. It just makes the mobile browser suck. And given that Adobe's Flash is the #1 Firefox crasher... yeah it's about time someone took the ball form Adobe.

And before someone genius comes out and says some nonsense about "desktop is dieing" I'd like to point out that nearly every time someone types it, it's going to be read on a desktop computer. Every major web market share statistic source says desktop browsers are around 90% while mobile browsers are around 10%. The mobile browser share is not growing anywhere close to the rate that phones are being sold. I'll leave it to the reader to figure out what people are actually using phones for, why people are replacing their phones 2 to 3 times a year more often than their desktop, and how it's probably not the desktop extinction event everybody is bent on finding.

They still don't seem to realize that (my estimation 95% of users only ever want to watch flash videos with it. They should have made a "flashplugin light" that was only capable of video playback and solving that problem efficiently.
That would have the advantage of making the flash advertisement garbage go away. Without ads this phoronix article makes chromium consume about 0% CPU on my 3632qm, with flash ads, chromium consumes accumulated about 10 to 20% CPU (of one core). I wonder how much energy humanity could have saved not having flash ads. I mean, not even not clogging the bandwidth with ads, just the client pcs not displaying them.
Not only do the ads waste energy and bandwidth compared to text ads, they also most often destroy or compromise the layout and are just plain ugly.

I mean, what the fuck.

So I would like a flash player that only is capable of playing flash content.

Maybe the approach of Shumway is modular enough so that you can restrict the code loading to that code that plays videos.

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I hope you guys know that pr0n is responsible for killing several formats, right? If something's not compatible with porn, it's not going to succeed, even if it's 10 times better than a porn-compatible format. Good examples are Beta vs VHS and HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray.

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We've seen games in html5 and other funky stuff -even thought i find the "works with chrome" thing utterly stupid.

Make the other browsers besides Chrome actually be able to run games properly, and that'd go away. We ported some of our HTML5 games work last year, and the speed on Firefox and Safari was just pathetic. It's doubly funny because at the time Firefox was leading the JS performance benchmarks. Problem is, games (and real apps in general) aren't micro-benchmarks, and Chrome devs put a lot of work into optimizing Google's real-world large-scale apps.

It was doubly confusing since Chrome's <canvas> implementation at the time was pure software, and Firefox had some low-end hardware accel. Either their hardware accel was the usual Open Source 2D rendering quality (e.g., slower than software, because they don't understand GPUs or how to use them for 2D rendering) or V8 really was just that much faster for game code than the competition. Those fun-looking image/audio DSP kernels that Mozilla used to advertise their JS speed ("faster than C!") really have nothing to do with real-world use cases, alas.